Gmail’s down! Help help help!

Gmail is currently down, and many thousands of people have been on Twitter saying “Gmail is down”, “Is Gmail down?”, and “Is there life without Gmail?”. This normally dependable, efficient service has thrown its toys out of the pram and suddenly all of the people who use it to manage all of their email accounts, tasks, documents and dreams are stymied. I’m one of them. Gmail stress. It’s unbearable. The thing to remember, folks, is that it is still a beta. Yes, after all this time. I’ve been spending the last several years thinking that Google would suddenly one day announce “Beta’s over, guys. It doesn’t work. We turned off Gmail, just deleted it. Sorry. Thanks for your help but we just couldn’t fix that thing where the person’s first name is sometimes their last name”.

I find the Gmail panic amusing however, being one of many thousands who, on a daily basis, struggle with truly useless IT at work. People panic on Twitter when Gmail ‘seems a bit slow this morning’, but what doesn’t trend (that is, what everyone isn’t discussing at the same time) is how their work PC takes twenty minutes to start before unceremoniously crashing, how they can’t kill misbehaving applications because IT policy has locked out their task manager, how their Intranet is a confusing and unapproachable nightmare, how SAP is an utter rhinocerous’s anus of an application, how finding information is a wild goose chase through shared network folders apparently organised by seven clowns in an exploding car, and how entire swathes of working life are thrown away staring at a magnifying glass on the screen, the urge to scream, cry and punch the monitor slowly and constantly building in the base of the gut.

Yes. Gmail goes tits up and the world unites. No-one is waving flags that the average organisation can’t provide computers qualified to do much more than simple addition and italic words, and advanced IT is the sound of breaking glass being added to a PowerPoint slide.

Gmail, you take your time. You’re the least of my worries.

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• Quality, not quantity